Relational thinking plays a central role in human cognition. However, it is not known how
children and adults acquire relational concepts and come to represent them in a form that is …

The authors present a theory of how relational inference and generalization can be
accomplished within a cognitive architecture that is psychologically and neurally realistic …

Five experiments were performed to test whether participants induced a coherent
representation of the structure of a task, called a relational schema, from specific instances …

A popular explanation of younger children's success in analogy tasks is that lower-level
associative reasoning strategies are used. Younger children are said to have a primarily …

Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. Robins eat worms, dogs chase cats, roses love sunshine.
These kinds of relations are as much a part of our understanding of the world as are the …

Inferences about spatial, temporal, and other relations are ubiquitous. This article presents a
novel model-based theory of such reasoning. The theory depends on 5 principles.(a) The …

Human cognitive abilities are remarkable. We easily go beyond what is perceptually
available to reason about abstract systems. Our cognitive ability to adapt to a vast range of …

The practice of learning from multiple instances seems to allow children to learn about
relational structure. The experiments reported here focused on two issues regarding …

The representation and manipulation of structured relations is central to human reasoning.
Recent work in computational modeling and neuroscience has set the stage for developing …

A normally developing child, Charlie (16 months old at the beginning and 27 months old at
the end of this study), was tested several times for the derivation of relations over a period of …